Many people/users are associated with multiple accounts, such as email, frequent flyer or financial accounts, such as checking accounts, savings accounts, retirement accounts, money market accounts, certificate of deposit accounts, and various debt accounts, by way of example, for homes, automobiles, boats, educational expenses, credit cards and other personal property. Further, many of these users may have insurance accounts, such as life, home, health, automobile or other insurance accounts with a financial institution. Advances in technology have allowed institutions and businesses, such as banking and financial institutions, to provide their customers with easy access to their various accounts via software applications and other online access. The result is that a single user may have a proliferation of accounts at more than one institution or business, including banking or financial institutions.
For example, a user may have a checking account and a savings account at a local or regional banking institution. That same user may have a mortgage account from a national lender for a home, a financial loan or a debt account for an automobile, and a financial loan or a debt account for college educational expenses. The user may also have a life insurance account, a health insurance account and a health savings account all at different banking or financial institutions. Further, the user may have one or more email accounts, frequent flyer accounts and so forth all with passwords or personal identification numbers that must be remembered by a user. Accordingly, it is difficult for users to maintain all of these various accounts. In response to the problem of proliferation of user accounts, personal financial management (PFM) providers have provided many with a solution of bringing all of a user's financial and other account information together in a single location. A PFM is a computer interface for assisting users with financial services and information.
A further problem arises when a user decides to change or switch from one institution, such as banking institution, a financial institution or data aggregator, to another. The process of changing account information, from one institution to another, whether directly or through a third party data management provider, can be difficult and time consuming for a user or institution, such as a banking or financial institution.
Due to the proliferation of the internet and the number of user accounts that are available through software applications or online access through various providers, data aggregators have become increasingly important in order to handle the large amount of data generated by millions of user accounts. Data aggregators are involved in compiling information and data from detailed databases regarding individuals and providing or selling that information to others, such as personal financial management providers. The potential of the internet to consolidate and manipulate information has a new application in data aggregation, which is also known as screen scraping. The internet and PFM providers allow users the opportunity to consolidate their usernames and passwords, or PINs in one location. Such consolidation enables consumers to access a wide variety of PIN-protected websites containing personal information by using one master PIN on a single website, such as through a PFM provider or otherwise. Online account providers include financial institutions, stockbrokers, airline and frequent flyer and other reward programs, and e-mail accounts. Data aggregators may gather account or other information about individuals from designated websites by using account holders' PINs, and then making the users' account information available to them at a single website operated by the aggregator or other third party at an account holder's request. Aggregation services may be offered on a standalone basis or in conjunction with other financial services, such as portfolio tracking and bill payment provided by a specialized website, or as an additional service to augment the online presence of an enterprise established beyond the virtual world, such as a banking or financial institution. Many established companies with an internet presence recognize the value of offering an aggregation service to enhance other web-based services and attract visitors to their websites. Offering a data aggregation service to a website may be attractive because of the potential that it will frequently draw users of the service to the hosting website. However, a problem may arise when a data aggregator's services are temporarily halted, become too expensive for third party businesses to utilize or otherwise become unavailable for some reason. The result is that account information may need to be moved by a user or third party to another institution, such as a personal financial management provider or financial institution.
Accordingly, the disclosure relates to a method and system for moving at least one account from one institution to another over a network of computers. The features and advantages of the disclosure will be set forth in the description which follows, and in part will be apparent from the description, or may be learned by the practice of the disclosure without undue experimentation. The features and advantages of the disclosure may be realized and obtained by means of the computing systems and combinations of firmware, software and hardware, particularly pointed out in the appended claims.